Sino-Tibetan based languages, such as Chinese, are vastly different from Latin based languages such as English. The Chinese language does not contain an alphabet. Instead, the Chinese language comprises more than 60,000 individual characters. Each character possesses a meaning, unlike letters of the alphabet, and a sound. Each Chinese character also has one of five fundamental tones or inflections. Tone is fundamental to the language. For example, the character whose sound is “ma” can either mean “mother” or “horse” or a “question” depending on the tone
Chinese also differs from Latin based languages in the concept of a word. In Chinese, strings of characters do not contain spaces and the interpretation of where one word ends and another starts is entirely based on context. Chinese characters generally retain their meaning when combined with others in a word. If a Chinese character has characters added to it in a string, the meaning of the first character is enhanced, but normally it is not radically change.
The Peoples' Republic of China (PRC or mainland China) introduced “Pin Yin,” a phonetic version of Chinese to help young children learn the language. Pin Yin uses the 26 letters of the English alphabet to indicate the sound of a character. For example, a character can be represented by letters “ma.” The tone is represented by 4 accents over certain vowels, or the absence of an accent. The accented vowels indicate the proper tone and are essential to proper pronunciation of Pin Yin. One technique for inputting Pin Yin that uses only the ASCII characters is based on adding a number after the Pin Yin word to indicate the accent as illustrated in Table 1.
TABLE 1NumberAccentDescriptionExamples1  Level Toneā ē ī ō ū2{acute over ( )}Rising Toneá é í ó ú3{hacek over ( )}Falling Tone, then Rising Tone{hacek over (a)} {hacek over (e)} {hacek over (i)} {hacek over (o)} {hacek over (u)}4{grave over ( )}Falling Toneà è ì ò ù5(None)No Change in Tonea e i o uThus, the word guó is input as guo2, the word mā as ma1, and so forth.
A method for translating between Simplified Chinese characters, Traditional Chinese characters, Pin Yin words, and English words was disclosed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/617,526, entitled “Chinese Character/Pin Yin/English Translator,” incorporated herein by reference. The software embodiment of the invention is a computer program which takes hybrid or unaccented Pin Yin input and produces as output a combination of accented Pin Yin, Simplified Chinese characters, and Traditional Chinese characters.
When Pin Yin is entered into a web page, it is necessary to place a numeral corresponding to the accent after the letters to indicate the accent. Currently the letters and numeral are translated into the accented form by Java® at the server, requiring a round trip to the server for the translation to be completed. What is needed beyond the prior art is a system and method to (1) perform the conversion process dynamically so that the translated Pin Yin including accents appear immediately without a round trip to the server, (2) to examine every character entered and to automatically change the text after the entry of each character is completed, and (3) to provide usability features to support learning and also to support making decisions when ambiguities are encountered.